2025-11-25 01:06:02
For the first cover of the December 1, 2025, special centenary issue titled “Our Far-Flung Correspondents,” the artist Malika Favre created “Taking Flight,” the latest adaptation of The New Yorker’s classic Eustace Tilley cover. The issue is the final in a series of four that were published to commemorate the magazine’s centenary this year; read the others here.
For more covers featuring Eustace Tilley, see below:
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2025-11-24 19:06:03
During a stolen hour in the spring of 1944, when Primo Levi had been a slave laborer at Auschwitz for about three months, a French prisoner asked Levi to teach him some Italian. Levi, a young chemist from Turin, went on to become a major chronicler of life in the camps, but at the time he didn’t believe that he had what it took to survive. He thought too much. He was hollow with hunger and painfully aware that his hands were covered in sores and that he smelled. Worst of all, he felt that the things he’d seen would leave him dead inside even if he survived. It would have been natural to give up. He didn’t initially understand why a part of the Divine Comedy came to mind in that furtive hour of teaching—it was hardly Italian Conversation 101—but Dante’s story of the Greek warrior Ulysses began to spill out of him. He forgot many lines but persevered, sometimes translating into French, determined to make his fellow-prisoner understand, especially the speech in which Ulysses urges a worn-out group of sailors, finally safe ashore, to go back out to sea:
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
You were not made to live your lives as brutes,
But to be followers of worth and knowledge.
Levi recalled that he seemed to be hearing the lines for the first time, and that they sounded like the voice of God. For a moment, he forgot where he was.
Dante’s Ulysses is the same mythical figure as Homer’s Odysseus, and Dante’s portrait shares much of the character’s familiar background: a hero of the Trojan War, he’s known for his craftiness, shown most famously in his idea that the Trojans might just fall for the gift of an enormous wooden horse secretly packed with soldiers. It’s after the Greeks have won the war, thanks largely to this brilliant ruse, that Homer and Dante radically diverge. In the Odyssey, Homer tells the story of Odysseus’ long return home. The voyage is full of stops and hesitations, but he resists the greatest lures in order to return to wife and son, father and homeland. Going home: that’s what the whole desperate voyage is about.
Our Far-Flung Correspondents: A Centenary Issue
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But it’s possible that Dante knew a different version of the story. He didn’t read Greek, and at the time he was writing, in the early fourteenth century, Homer had yet to be properly translated into Latin, let alone Italian. Then, too, any version with a happy homecoming simply wasn’t the story Dante needed to tell. His Ulysses is an adventurer with an insatiable appetite for knowledge and experience. Though his family is waiting at home, he chooses to remain at sea and to sail beyond the accepted limit of human navigation, the Strait of Gibraltar—remember, this was written nearly two hundred years before Columbus—into an empty ocean and dangers unknown. The speech he makes to the ragged remnant of his men, a portion of which appears above in Allen Mandelbaum’s translation, is filled with pride and aspiration. Levi, like many others, found Ulysses’ speech to be a sustaining example of the human spirit unshackled. And yet Ulysses brings about the death of all his men, who, having been persuaded, follow their leader and are drowned in a furious storm. More, the whirlwind that takes them under is no mere accident but the act of a wrathful God. The speech is a key reason that Dante’s Ulysses is damned to a hell even worse than Levi’s, because it is eternal.
The Divine Comedy, conceived as a guided tour of the Christian afterlife, is written in three volumes corresponding to the realms that greet all human souls after their brief embodiment on earth: Inferno (or Hell), Purgatory, and Paradise. The author, Dante Alighieri, born in Florence in 1265, is also its leading character—not a warrior as in the Homeric epics or their Latin successor, Virgil’s Aeneid, but, rather, a poet, a flawed and introspective man whose fall into despair sets the drama in motion. Is Dante experiencing a crisis of faith? Or, in today’s terms, a midlife crisis of direction? (He tells us that he is halfway through his life.) Is he having trouble imagining the epic poem that he aspires to write? All these problems, bound together, begin to be solved when Virgil appears in the dark wood where Dante finds himself, leading him past dangers that have blocked his path. Or, more precisely, the shade of Virgil appears, since he lived in the age of Emperor Augustus and has been dead for some thirteen hundred years.
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The great Roman poet inspired Dante in many ways—in the Aeneid, Aeneas visits the Underworld to consult his father—and in the Divine Comedy Virgil is wise, kind, protective. He becomes like a father to the often bewildered younger poet, leading him from the mouth of Hell to its core, and then back up, through Purgatory and to the brink of Paradise. There, Virgil must cede his duty to another. As a pagan who died before the time of Christ, and was therefore incapable of true faith, he can’t set foot in Paradise and must return to his assigned place in the divine scheme. He, too, it turns out—the dearest figure in Dante’s vastly buzzing world, a sort of antique Polonius or Dumbledore—is doomed to pass eternity in a subdivision of Hell. There is no physical torture in this place, called Limbo, and the conversation is presumably exceptional. (Homer, Horace, and Ovid are among the other virtuous pagans we glancingly meet there.) But this is not to say that Virgil doesn’t suffer from being denied salvation. For him, Limbo remains a “dark prison,” because it shuts out, forever and without hope, the light of God.
Even to Dante, the rules seem confusingly unfair. Hell, clearly the most violent of the realms, makes for the most exuberantly entertaining of the books, filled with action, fantastical monsters, and occasional farce. (One well-named devil, Malacoda—Evil Tail—summons his posse with enormous farts that “make a trumpet of his ass.”) Above all, it’s filled with human stories. Dante—the character called Dante—moves through its nine ever-worsening circles like a reporter, drawing tales out of miserable souls by promising to preserve their names and stories back on earth. He’s the rarest of creatures, a living visitor, and he’s taking mental notes. Virgil, in a strikingly modern touch, persuades a terrifying giant who serves as a sort of elevator system between infernal levels to let them down gently, telling him that Dante—Dante the writer—can make him famous.
Hell is nevertheless filled with bloody and horrific torments. In Dante’s eyes, some sinners fully deserve what they get: corrupt clerics, for example—including a Pope—are jammed upside down into holes in the rocky earth, legs flailing and feet licked by fire. (There are a notable number of churchmen in Hell; also Florentines.) At other times, he pities the souls he meets and is chastised by Virgil for it. To feel pity is to question the judgment of God. For Satan has no power here; he himself suffers at Hell’s lowest level, bound in ice. It is God who has sentenced unrepentant sinners to this place and designed ingenious torments to echo their crimes. So adulterous lovers are battered by fierce winds that whirl them around in each other’s arms, mimicking the turbulent passion they did not control. Fortune-tellers—those who claimed to know what only God can know—have their heads twisted backward, so they can see nothing but what is behind them. And Ulysses, silver-tongued persuader of men, is encased in a tongue of flame. Yet, however justly these transgressors are condemned, they draw not only Dante’s sympathy but ours, too, luring us into the uneasy position of doubting divine justice.
Going beyond boundaries, daring everything for knowledge, Dante’s Ulysses has much in common with mankind’s faulty prototype, Adam, whom Dante eagerly interrogates in Paradise. (Question: How long did you live in the Garden before biting the apple? Answer: About seven hours.) He also has much in common with Dante himself, in the poet’s sheer gall in taking on this work: entering forbidden territories, exploring the worst and the best of man, trying to penetrate the mind of God. And, although he can’t let go of nagging qualms or dangerous questions, he gives the readers who are persuaded by his silver tongue fair warning. “Turn back if you would see your shores again,” Dante cautions us. “The seas I sail were never sailed before.”
Homer was not one person, it is now generally agreed, but a slowly accumulating oral tradition given a name. Virgil’s Aeneid breaks off suddenly, apparently unfinished, and at his death the poet is said to have asked that the manuscript be burned. (Caesar Augustus intervened.) Dante Alighieri, the successor to these civilization-defining literary forces, was born to a family of moderate means in an Italian city torn by political violence and in an era when the rebirth of classical learning had barely begun. He was a contemporary and possibly an acquaintance of the great Florentine painter Giotto, whom he mentions in the Comedy for having seized attention from Cimabue—Giotto’s former master, who produced images of icon-like rigidity—much as Dante himself will overtake the writers of his youth. Here, in two different arts, is the moment when medieval severity gives way to physical and psychological nuance, when human figures stretch their limbs and take breath. Within a generation, Boccaccio would write that Dante had opened the way for the long-absent Muses to return to Italy.
He was ambitious from the start. Prue Shaw, in her new book, “Dante: The Essential Commedia” (Liveright), emphasizes the exceptional importance and nobility that Dante accords the vocation of the poet, and how, from early on, he believed his powers to be equal to those of the great poets of classical antiquity. His early writing reflected the popular style of the French troubadours, courtly poet-musicians who sang of their longing for a beautiful lady. In his case, the beloved was the unobtainable Beatrice Portinari, a wealthy banker’s daughter whom Dante claimed to have loved from their first meeting, when both were children—a bit of charming self-mythology—and steadily on until her untimely death, at twenty-four. It didn’t seem to matter that he saw her rarely or that both were married off to others for financial and political reasons. The Divine Comedy has nothing to say about Dante’s wife, or their four children. Beatrice was the love that fuelled his poems, which only became more spiritual after her death, when her very name—which suggests beatitude—becomes for him a form of prayer.
If poetry made Dante’s life, politics overturned it. In 1300, in his mid-thirties, he served on a Florentine governing committee that exiled several leaders of two clashing political factions, in a bid for peace. The following year, while Dante was on a diplomatic mission to Rome, his own faction back home was ousted, and he was falsely accused of corruption. He found himself exiled from Florence in absentia and, in 1302, he was sentenced to burn at the stake should he ever return. For the rest of his life—nearly twenty years—he sought refuge in various Italian cities, with their unfamiliar dialects and local cultures, nursing both a bitterness and a longing that are felt in the epic work he undertook. He probably started writing it in about 1307, but he set the poem, very deliberately, before his exile—at Easter, 1300. He called it simply the Comedy, meaning a work that begins in darkness but, unlike a tragedy, ends in light. The adjective “Divine” was added by a printer more than two hundred years later, reflecting both the work’s subject matter and its status.
Classical mythology, ancient and medieval history, Christian theology, astronomy, morality, Aristotelian philosophy, monks and nuns and whores and forgers and blasphemers and poets (Purgatory is full of poets): all are contained in a rhyme scheme of Dante’s invention and in the Tuscan dialect that was the only home remaining to him. Three books comprising a hundred chapterlike cantos, the Latin-derived word a tribute to the poetry’s deep musical origins.
Fourteen thousand two hundred and thirty-three lines. Not in Latin, it must be emphasized, the language of erudition and prestige—the obvious choice for an epic work—but in a language that ordinary people spoke and that (as he said) even women could read. Illiterates would have heard it recited; there are fourteenth-century tales of blacksmiths and garbage collectors rattling off passages by heart. But how many people, even then, could make out the references? The need for a supplemental commentary—footnotes—was recognized by one of the earliest Dante scholars, Dante’s son Jacopo, soon after the poet’s death, when the ink on Paradise was barely dry. By the end of the fourteenth century, the list of commentaries was long. To read what has accumulated now would be a career.
So how does one enter this overwhelming work? There is no single perfect or even agreed-upon English translation, although there are dozens of them. It’s been adapted in prose, blank verse, and close imitations of terza rima, Dante’s distinctive three-line scheme, in which the first and third line of every verse rhyme with each other, while the second line loops forward like a threaded needle to stitch the rhyme of the next verse into place. And onward ad infinitum, creating a springing momentum that feels natural in Italian, with its plenitude of words that rhyme on the final syllable, but is impossible to capture without strain in English, a language that wearied translators describe as “rhyme-poor.” One must salute the translators who continue to devote stretches of their lives to this seven-hundred-year-old poem, pledging to a mad voyage of their own, determined to make readers understand the love that drives them. And one must not blame them if, in an age of shrunken attention spans, they become a bit desperate.
Shaw’s book takes a novel approach. “The Essential Commedia” isn’t a standard translation but a radically abridged version of the text, with chunks of the poem (in Italian and in Shaw’s translation) set like jewels into a running commentary made up of narrative bridges, historical context, interpretation, and occasional witty asides. It all fits into one volume and, though the original’s momentum is undone, Shaw—a first-rate British Dante scholar—provides a momentum of her own. If it’s a cheat, it’s also an open invitation to new readers. And it gets better as it goes along, since so much less assistance is needed in the packed storytelling of Inferno than in the theological vagaries of Paradise, which have been known to stop some readers cold. Shaw repeatedly clarifies the most “dense” and “taxing” paradisial discussions, from an explanation of the dark spots on the moon to an account of the moment of creation. Yet Shaw herself is nearly transparent. Try to speak of what she’s done and you speak only of Dante.
The poet Mary Jo Bang’s Divine Comedy—recently completed, after some twenty years, with the publication of Paradiso (Graywolf)—isn’t a standard translation, either. It’s closer to an improvisation, filled with references to movies and rock (and jazz) albums which veer far from the Italian and are meant to draw new readers by making Dante our contemporary. Led Zeppelin, Charles Mingus, Cyndi Lauper, and “The Wizard of Oz,” to name a few, contribute lyrics and phrases and appear in the scholarly (if sometimes wryly po-faced) footnotes. Bang calls her work a “colloquial” version, and it can admittedly be jarring to hear Virgil sound like a slacker: “What’s up with you,” he asks Dante, who has just had a vision of the martyrdom of St. Stephen, “that you can’t keep it together?” Yet this may be something of the effect that Dante sought in using the common language that he loved in part for the way it changed. Bang does better with the grotesquerie of hellfire, where lowballing the tone can have a sharp, often comic edge. And she sometimes lands a line with stinging freshness. In the very fine traditional translation I usually reach for, by Robert and Jean Hollander, the demonic ferryman Charon warns “you wicked souls,” whom he is transporting to Hell, to “give up hope of ever seeing heaven.” And then there’s Bang: “Give it up, you scum-uncles,” Charon growls. “You’ll never see the sky again.”
Language may change, but people don’t, and the mirror Dante holds up has made him a constant contemporary. Purgatory, the middle realm, is a place where sinners who have repented—even right before dying, even if only in their thoughts—are sent to be cleansed before ascending to Paradise. It has no direct Biblical source but became Church doctrine in Dante’s time, providing hope to those who feared that they weren’t worthy of Paradise. Dante situates it on a mountain rising out of an empty sea. On its seven terraces, people suffer torments not for the sake of punishment but to be cured of their predilection for however many of the seven deadly sins—Pride, Envy, Lust, etc.—they’ve committed. Depending on your nature, you may be able to skip a terrace or two. (Nobody skips Pride, so don’t bother pretending to be above it.) The lessons are harsh; the envious have their eyes sewn shut with iron wire. Still, in contrast with Hell, there is the promise of getting out; time passes. Prayers from pious souls on earth can shorten your sentence, and the Church was busy developing other sorts of pardons, too, for cash. A professor who currently teaches a course about Dante to prisoners says that Purgatory is their favorite part.
Some of the most defining writers of the modern age were fixated on the idea of Dante as a contemporary, and their recognition points up the poet’s unorthodoxies. To the circles of Hell, for example, he added a realm of sinners of his own invention—those who never make a true commitment to a cause, who live “without disgrace yet without praise” and are confined (plagued by wasps and stinging flies) with the angels who took no side when Lucifer made war on God. Dante had certainly hated this type in life; the shock here is how many of these indifferent souls there are. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” T. S. Eliot wrote, in “The Waste Land,” using Dante’s realization to transpose a scene of medieval Hell to twentieth-century London, where crowds of commuters move dully through brown morning fog, their eyes fixed just beyond their feet as if they, too, will never see the sky again.
And just outside the gates of Purgatory, near the base of the mountain, Dante comes upon an old friend called Belacqua, lounging in the shade of a boulder. An indolent procrastinator, he explains that, because he waited to repent until his life was nearly over, he must now wait for as many years as he lived before purgation can begin. So, why move at all? Bang, showing a little trouble with the rules of Purgatory, and with math, projects that he will have to wait twenty-one thousand years, a period that Samuel Beckett would likely have found pleasing. Beckett was an assiduous reader of Dante and put Belacqua into his fiction many times, starting—in the story “Dante and the Lobster”—with Belacqua Shuah, a lazy young Dubliner who is studying Dante and learns firsthand about compassion for the damned. (“Why not piety and pity both, even down below?” he worries.) For Beckett, Belacqua was a key to our condition as much as Ulysses was for Primo Levi. He seems to walk straight into Beckett’s uncanny world, along with a small compendium of Dante’s other sorry souls—the ones half buried in mud, in excrement, in tombs, all determined to speak—made recognizably modern by the omission of cause or purpose in their plight.
Dante’s compassion for Virgil grows as they near the point where the older poet must leave the younger behind. In Purgatory, Dante has seen pagan souls who are saved—he will see more in Paradise—exceptions that make Virgil’s fate even more inexplicably harsh. After persevering through all seven terraces, master and pupil emerge at the top of the mountain, which, in Dante’s sacred geography, is the location of the Garden of Eden, the last cleansing stop before Paradise. Together, they watch a fully costumed procession of the Church Triumphant, with flying banners and choral hallelujahs—Dante turns to Virgil, who returns his look of amazement—culminating in a chariot carrying the long-sought Beatrice, veiled in white. Commentators often claim that Beatrice represents faith and Virgil reason; Virgil himself has warned that reason can’t access the upper realms. It is Beatrice who will lead Dante there. Still, Dante is unprepared. Seeing Beatrice, he feels the rising flame of a very human love. He turns once more to tell Virgil about it—he has a quote from the Aeneid ready to convey the sensation—but Virgil is gone. And, in the Garden of Eden, where the woman he’s yearned for stands before him and insists that everyone in this place is always happy, he can’t stop weeping.
Dante’s journey began, he tells us early on in Inferno, because the Virgin Mary wanted to save him from the dangers of the dark wood. We can’t know for certain why he was singled out, but it can be inferred (from what he has a saint tell Beatrice) that the Virgin admired his poems, specifically the spiritually elevated love poems devoted to Beatrice. It is because of his art that he is led through Hell, Purgatory, and, finally, Paradise. He will see God’s universe, and he will write a book that makes others see it, too. The show put on for him in the upper realm is spectacular: brilliant lights, aerial dancing, music, all spread across the moon and the planets, where he and Beatrice travel, going past the stars to God’s own home in the empyrean. Dante is dazzled but, as readers have long noted, he does not seem entirely comfortable. Spectacle is hard to make compelling in writing; so are long speeches about religion or astronomy. He prays to Apollo for inspiration, which seems theologically unsound and has tied centuries of scholars into knots. But it’s Dante’s lapses and struggles that infuse this rigidly triumphant final sphere with enlivening consciousness and tension. He asks too many questions: Why couldn’t God forgive mankind without resorting to the Crucifixion? Why has a particular saint been chosen for a given task? One exasperated saint explains that the answers are beyond human comprehension, adding that when Dante returns to earth he should dissuade people from such questioning. This is one bit of heavenly advice he doesn’t take.
Beatrice provides little of Virgil’s reassuring warmth. However beautiful, she is unexpectedly stern, austere, and doctrine-driven; she’s been referred to as Thomas Aquinas in drag. Given to phrases like “in my infallible opinion,” she reminds Dante of a military leader. She’s initially hard on him because the rules require that he confess his sinning ways—chiefly, it seems, in the matter of his interest in another woman after Beatrice’s death (or possibly in other women, the Italian being judiciously unclear). But her mission has always been to keep him true to the higher path. If this devoutness doesn’t come easy to him, that’s the point, conveyed with surprising humor and accumulating force. By some Dantean law, Beatrice’s physical beauty increases as the two move closer to God, and he can’t look at anything but her. “Turn around and listen / Because Paradise isn’t only in my eyes,” she instructs. For Dante, though, the flesh has become the way to the spirit. His first sight of God is as a point of light reflected in those eyes.
By the time Dante began writing Paradise, in about 1317, he was in his early fifties and had been exiled from Florence for some fifteen years. (He’d lived for a welcome period under steady patronage in Verona but moved to Ravenna in his later years, at the invitation of its ruler.) There’s reason to think that he would have further polished his final volume had he had more time, but it’s also true that his poetic energies were rooted in the imperfectly human, in the experience of daily life. At one point, he is told about his coming exile. “You will leave behind everything you love most dearly,” the prophecy begins (in Shaw’s translation):
You will experience how salty is the taste
of another man’s bread, and how hard a road it is
to go up and down another man’s stairs.
His first reaction is fear that, without a home and the protection of a government, he won’t have the courage to tell the truth about powerful figures and risk exposure to their revenge. But in Paradise he’s told he must speak anyway: “Open your mouth.” This is advice he takes. The Divine Comedy is a work of political courage, from its willing antagonism of the families of the damned who are named in Inferno to the greater targets of Paradise, where Dante clearly felt that he had nothing left to lose. Here, residents of Heaven, including Thomas Aquinas and St. Benedict, variously denounce the state of the Dominican, Franciscan, and Benedictine orders. St. Peter rails against the greed and the political intrigues of the contemporary Papacy, which have turned the Church into “a sewer of blood and stench.” The city of Florence is condemned, too: once a modest and well-mannered republic, it’s now corrupted by wealth and vulgar display. Except for Hell, it’s the place that Dante seems to hate most.
And, excepting Paradise, it’s the place he most wants to be. In a startlingly personal aside at the opening of a late canto, he speaks about the lean years he has spent writing the poem and his hopes for the completed work. He doesn’t speak of spreading knowledge of God’s magnificent and moral universe, although this has been his charge and remains an important goal. He doesn’t speak of literary immortality, although this, too, is certainly important (if covertly so, being the wrong kind of immortality). He speaks, instead, of contemporary fame, a triumph so resounding that the Florentines will publicly repent his cruel exile and ask him to return, crowning him with laurel in the baptistery where he was christened. “I shall return a poet.”
He died in 1321, in Ravenna, and was laid to rest in a plain stone tomb. But other hopes came to pass, over the years, along with achievements and repercussions he could not have imagined. Because of Dante, by the nineteenth century the Tuscan dialect had become the Italian language. The Popes began to claim him as their own. Politically, his thought was broad enough to be used in support of radically opposed ideas. The American abolitionist Charles Sumner cited Dante on the damnation of those who never fought for a cause; Teddy Roosevelt used the same passages to try to push the United States into the First World War. Mussolini twisted phrases from the poem to justify Fascist racial laws. For a man of his era—always a worrisome qualification—Dante seems remarkably free of prejudice against the Jewish people and religion, and there is a panoply of Old Testament figures in Paradise. He was harder on the Muslim religion, which he regarded as a schismatic breakaway from Christianity, a medieval position used by recent right-wing Italian politicians to champion a purely Christian Italian state. Bang, in her introduction to Paradiso, points to Dante’s political relevance in our own country at a time when partisan warfare is as destructive as in the era he decried. Politics may be as good a way as any to enter the poem. Come for the corrupt politicians boiling in pitch; stay for the poetry and the spellbinding stories.
Among the newly arrived souls on the shores of Purgatory, Dante meets another old friend, a musician, who greets him eagerly. No population numbers have been recorded, but it seems the middling souls consigned to pass through this place must make up the majority of human beings, we who regret our worst habits but not quite enough to change them before time runs out. Dante, fresh from Hell and feeling low, asks if his friend would be able to sing one of the love songs that used to soothe him. (No one seems to know the rules, yet; what’s allowed, how long the wait, how much pain one has earned.) In response, the man begins to sing a poem of Dante’s, with such ease that it seems he must have set it back at home. His voice is exceptionally sweet. And until the guard comes along, yelling and hurrying everybody on, we forget where we are, and there is nothing but the song. ♦
2025-11-24 19:06:03
Hello! I am the weak female lead in this dystopian Y.A. action movie, and I really just need to lie down. Ever since we ran away from Society six days ago, my ankle’s been acting weird. Not, like, broken-weird, but every time I step down it kind of makes this clicking noise? Wait, it just did it again. Did you hear that?
Our ragtag group of renegades knows that there’s no turning back, now that the stakes are life or death. I’ve grown to trust many of them, except Chris. Maybe I’m reading into things, but he’s never asked me a single question about myself, even though he’s made an effort to talk to literally everyone else. Also, yesterday, I offered him a bite of my roasted rat and he didn’t even say thank you. I just feel like he hates me. Do you think he hates me? . . .
Society’s Guard has almost discovered us several times, and when we hid in that moldy basement—not the first one but the second one—I think I inhaled something bad. My face was close to the exposed wall and now my throat is scratchy? I’m a hypochondriac so it could totally be nothing, but it could also be cancer. . . .
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Last night, we were captured by Society’s Guard and betrayed by Chris, who gave up our safe-house coördinates in exchange for immunity and six cans of beans. Literally, why does he hate me?!
Now we are all in prison, waiting for the Pr0gRaM, which is a serum Society injects into our brains, to rid us of any freethinking, critical, individualistic impulses until we are all mindless, loyal drones. I jokingly asked one of the guards if he could just re- Pr0gRaM my brain to get rid of my A.D.H.D., and he laughed. Maybe I should try standup comedy? . . .
Huzzah! A resistance of misfits within Society’s walls has broken us out of prison and now we have regrouped to fight another day. However, the two men I have been embroiled in a love triangle with this whole time have forced me to choose between them. Stressful! One is someone I’ve known my entire life. The other is someone I’ve known for five days and talked to twice. This choice is a hard one, and I am paralyzed with anxiety! Especially because one is blond and I don’t do blonds. I will most likely date both men for as long as I can and then, ultimately, either take a cyanide pill or marry the one I like less.
Also, I haven’t taken a shower in two weeks and I feel like I have a U.T.I. . . .
For some strange reason, I have been voted to be the leader of this final uprising against Society. I believe they have mistaken me for another brunette named Rebecca who is good at stuff like this. Regardless, I had to make a big speech in front of the entire resistance to fire them up for battle, but public speaking is my greatest fear and I feel like I said some weird stuff! Like, I kept calling people “girlies,” and I feel like I shouldn’t have mentioned how scary Society’s new laser-your-eyeballs-out-of-your-head guns are. Morale is low, and I am spiralling that this is all my fault! . . .
The battle against Society is over and the resistance has won! We lost many men, even Chris, but their deaths, his especially, were necessary sacrifices for the greater movement. The evil leader of Society has surrendered, and, in a symbolic act, I shot and killed him in front of all of Society. I had never shot a gun before, so I first shot his knee, and then I shot his arm, and then I shot that same knee a couple more times by accident. He died very slowly and publicly and it was so awkward! . . .
It’s been a few months since the big battle, and life is peaceful, at last. There is no more war, no more repression, and no more poverty. Everything is great, and I have completely moved through the trauma of all the death I experienced. Even my love-triangle situation has been resolved. I married the one I like less! Do you think I made the wrong decision? ♦
2025-11-24 19:06:03
Three dozen climate negotiators and scientists were at Lincoln Center the other day, in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, to see a performance of “Kyoto,” about the landmark 1997 treaty on greenhouse-gas emissions. It was a bittersweet reunion for “Team Climate U.S.A.,” as Sue Biniaz, a State Department lawyer for more than thirty years, put it, while addressing the group in the lobby after the show. On the one hand, “we usually work in total obscurity,” she said. “So to make it the subject of an incredible play is really, really nice for us.” On the other hand, “we are no longer in that business.” The Trump Administration eliminated the department’s climate-negotiation office in April, a few months after announcing its withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
The play stars Stephen Kunken as an oil lobbyist named Don Pearlman, who addresses the audience at the outset. “I think we can all agree on one thing,” he says. “The times you live in are fucking awful.” Then, with a smile, he adds, “The nineteen-nineties were freakin’ glorious!” His cynicism in playing the Saudis against the Tanzanians and the Chinese is matched only by his hunger for cigarettes. (The actual Pearlman died of lung-cancer complications in 2005, at sixty-nine.) Yet Kunken gives the character a roguish charisma, in his tireless defense of American freedom, that Biniaz couldn’t help observing was arguably fictional. “Don was not nearly as charming in real life,” she said, to knowing laughter.
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The cast and the forlorn climateers mingled. Biniaz remarked that she was struck by how well something as ostensibly dry and technical as multilateral negotiation translated to the stage. “There’s a certain performative aspect to the negotiations where you might have to appear more frustrated or angry than you actually are,” she granted. “There’s also kind of an onstage-offstage aspect. It’s, like, ‘Oh, So-and-So is just so annoying.’ You’ll say, ‘Yeah, but offstage he’s really a nice guy.’ ”
Kunken, for his part, felt that the core theme of the story—arriving at consensus—was an apt metaphor for live theatre. “Doing a play is coming to an agreement,” he said. “Every actor wants to tell their character’s story: this is my moment. And another actor says, ‘I know, but, if you do that, then you’re missing this set of beats for me.’ You’re in front of an audience, and any single person on any given night can pull the focus by doing something extraneous.”
Tim Lattimer, a former deputy office director at the State Department, and a longtime environmentalist, asked Kunken if he was familiar with the Scott Freeman studio, an acting school. “Oh, sure,” Kunken said.
“Scott and I did high-school theatre together,” Lattimer said. “I’ve had people say I shouldn’t have been a scientist.”
A memorable scene in the play depicts the various international delegations arguing over punctuation marks in a singsong cadence. The real-life negotiators praised this as an illustration of the art of “constructive ambiguity,” allowing each country to declare slightly differing interpretations of victory. “The Chinese negotiator, my counterpart there, was named Su,” Biniaz recalled, referring to Su Wei. “We were the two Sues. We one time had something without commas, which is how I wanted it. And he said, ‘I accept that, if we add a comma,’ because his English was so amazing that he knew that that would give him a slight advantage. It was like playing tennis with someone who’s better than you—forces you to up your game. And every time I was with Su, even though this was not his native language, I felt like I had to be completely in the zone.” She added, “One of our major principles is called common but differentiated responsibilities. So I wrote an article called ‘Comma but Differentiated Responsibilities.’ ”
One of the playwrights, Joe Robertson, mentioned another Chinese negotiator, an academic named Shukong Zhong, whose command of English was such that he translated Charles Dickens in his spare time. “Dickens was viewed as sort of the epitome of the terrors and excesses of Western capitalism,” Robertson said. “So he was very popular in China.”
“Professor Zhong was amazing,” Biniaz agreed. “He would always argue for principles before you could start negotiating. He would talk about ‘In China, when a housewife makes a rice meal, she starts with rice.’ Our guy was Dan Reifsnyder at the time, and he would have some other metaphor, about how, when he cooks, he usually starts with a recipe. The whole room was just watching the two of them go back and forth.”
“A duel of metaphors,” Robertson said.
“All about the kitchen.”
Joking, one of the ex-negotiators asked Joe Murphy, the other playwright, if they were going to tackle the Paris agreement next. “This is the first of a trilogy!” Murphy replied. “Yeah, the next one’s like ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’ Copenhagen: everything collapses and it’s a disaster.” Then would come Paris, as “Return of the Jedi,” a bit of optimism before, well, the fucking-awful present. Tim Lattimer raised his hand. “Can I just say thank you for doing it in this theatre and not the Koch Theatre?” ♦
2025-11-24 19:06:03
In a rehearsal studio in the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, Kurtis Blow was limbering up and getting loose. Earlier this year, his left arm swelled up abruptly, requiring four surgeries to resolve what was eventually diagnosed as deep-vein thrombosis. Blow usually holds the mike in his right hand when he raps, but he had to get his left arm going, he said, “because it’s my ‘Throw your hands in the air’ arm.”
Lithe at age sixty-six, Blow was dressed in leather cargo pants, a track jacket, and a black baseball cap with the words “I AM HIP HOP” above its brim. He was whipping himself into shape for a “Legends of Hip-Hop” concert to be held just after Thanksgiving at the Peacock Theatre, in downtown L.A. He will be on a stage that will also feature such foundational rappers as Big Daddy Kane, Doug E. Fresh, and two members of the Furious Five, Melle Mel and Scorpio.
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Blow’s youngest son, Michael, the studio’s owner, manned the d.j. deck, wearing a hoodie from Stanford, his alma mater. The rapper’s eldest, Kurtis, Jr., nodded his do-ragged head to the beat and offered counsel alongside his mother, Kurtis, Sr.,’s wife of forty-two years, Shirley. (The Walkers, to use the family’s civilian surname, also have a third son, Mark.)
It has been forty-five years since the release of Blow’s song “The Breaks,” the first rap single to be certified gold. Blow had already scored a novelty hit, “Christmas Rappin’,” at the end of 1979, the watershed year in which rap transitioned from clubs in the Bronx and Harlem to singles pressed on vinyl, chief among them “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang. “I had a singles deal with escalating options,” Blow recalled. “I had to sell thirty thousand records in order to do another single. The Christmas rap sold over four hundred thousand copies. So the producers said, ‘What do you want to do for your next single?’ ”
Blow was first discovered a couple of years earlier, when he was spotted in performance by Robert (Rocky) Ford, Jr., a Billboard journalist covering the burgeoning rap scene. Ford and a colleague on the ad-sales side, J. B. Moore, were so impressed by the teen-age performer that they asked if they could produce and co-write records with him. Blow agreed, and, abetted by Ford’s and Moore’s connections, became the first rapper to sign with a major label, Mercury.
With Ford and Moore eager for a follow-up to “Christmas Rappin’,” Blow said, “I told them, ‘Well, I want to do a song for all my b-boys.’ I was a hard-core break-dancer and a d.j. as well. James Brown was my thing. The most important part of a song for a b-boy is the break, the part where the vocals drop out. So I wanted a song with a lot of breaks.”
As Blow recalls, Moore, a bespectacled white man in his late thirties, was intrigued by the connotations of the word “breaks.” It could refer to good breaks and bad breaks. It was a homonym for brakes, the things you pump to slow down your car. And it was also, as Blow articulated, a musical term. Moore and Blow fashioned a litany of breaks/brakes in all manner of categories.
Some of them betrayed the thought processes of the older writer, e.g., “And the I.R.S. says they wanna chat / (That’s the breaks, that’s the breaks) / And you can’t explain why you claimed your cat.” Other lyrics, like one in which Blow exhorted a girl in brown to stop messin’ around, bore the stamp of the rapper himself.
The end result was an infectious bop enlivened by Blow’s exuberant rapping style, which was inspired, he said, by the rhyming patter of Hank Spann, a d.j. on the New York radio station WWRL, then devoted to R. & B.
“The Breaks” was a crossover smash, and it bent the course of musical history. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, the married rhythm section of Talking Heads, were so taken by the song that they name-checked the rapper in “Genius of Love,” the 1981 post-punk-funk single by their side project, Tom Tom Club: “Stepping in a rhythm to a Kurtis Blow / Who needs to think when your feet just go?”
“When that song came out, I was, like, cheesin’ so much you could’ve put a banana in my mouth sideways,” Blow said.
In a Zoom call, Frantz avowed that the influence of “The Breaks” goes even deeper. “The timbale breaks in the first Tom Tom Club single, ‘Wordy Rappinghood,’ were inspired by the timbale parts in ‘The Breaks,’ ” he said. It had an effect on Talking Heads, too. Once, when David Byrne was stuck on a lyric for the song “Crosseyed and Painless,” Frantz recalled, “I said, ‘David, there’s this new thing called rap, and if you could just rap a part it would be cool.’ ” He played him “The Breaks,” which yielded Byrne’s now famous “Facts are simple and facts are straight” bars.
Blow is proud of his squeaky-clean image, which was a conscious choice. “I made two hundred and forty-three rap songs and never used profanity,” he said. “I sacrificed my career so guys like Chuck D and KRS-One could come up and really teach and empower our youth.”
He’s Kurtis Blow, and he wants you to know that these are the breaks. ♦
2025-11-24 19:06:03
When I visited the king of Bukumu, Mwami Butsitsi Kahembe IV Isaac, he was dressed in a crisp white caftan, with the skin of a leopard killed by his great-grandfather slung over his shoulders. A crown of matching fur sat on his head, and an ivory-tipped scepter announced his rank. The surroundings were less elegant. The king told me ruefully that his ancestral palace had been destroyed thirty years ago by combatants from the Hutu tribe, and that he had not yet found the resources to rebuild it. We met instead at his office in a compound at the edge of the city of Goma, in the eastern Congo. Mwami Isaac, as he is known, arrived in a chauffeur-driven Land Cruiser, escorted by three bodyguards carrying assault rifles.
It was a bright fall morning, but the sky was hazy with smoke from Mt. Nyiragongo, the volcano that loomed thousands of feet above. The Bukumu kingdom occupies about a hundred and thirty square miles in the province of North Kivu, and large portions of it are covered by black lava scree. Nyiragongo has erupted several times in recent decades. In 2021, lava consumed an entire neighborhood, killing dozens of the king’s subjects and forcing thousands more to flee.
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At the time of the eruption, Mwami Isaac was twenty-six, but already several years into his reign; he had taken the throne after studying political science at a university in Goma. “I rule over every aspect of my people’s lives,” he said. “They see me as the keeper of their traditions and as a symbol of unity, as well as the bridge between tradition and modernity.” There were some traditions that Isaac had been unable to uphold. “The people believe that when the volcano erupts, the king is upset,” he explained. His forebears had offered sacrifices, “including cows and sometimes virgin girls.” With a cheeky smile, he said that modern human-rights laws forbade sacrificing virgins, so the volcano did what it wished.
In a waiting room outside the office, petitioners sat on benches, facing a wall decorated with photographs of Bukumu monarchs. The earliest shows Mwami Isaac’s great-grandfather, wearing a belted military uniform enlivened with heavy gold medallions. In the most recent portrait, Isaac sits on an intricately carved throne with a distant look, as if surveying his domain.
The Bukumu kingdom is a small part of a vast country that has been riven for centuries by tribal disputes and colonial violence. As Isaac told it, his kingdom’s history is rife with treachery, usurpation, and murder. His great-grandfather came to power during King Leopold II of Belgium’s bloody occupation of Congo, and ruled for five decades. His succession was contested, though; Isaac’s grandfather and father both inherited the throne as children and were forced to vie for power with a relative who was twice appointed as regent. According to Isaac, the regent was a cruel and greedy man who killed his subjects, took their land, and allied himself with Congo’s dictator, Joseph Mobutu. After the regent died, his son ruled unlawfully for twenty years before dying in an explosion. Isaac’s father reclaimed the throne, but died when Isaac was two—shot by a rival in the office where we were sitting.
In January, there was another tumultuous transfer of power in North Kivu. After years of fighting with Congolese government forces, a rebel army known as the M23 seized control of Goma and a large swath of surrounding territory. A framed photograph on Mwami Isaac’s desk showed him posed with the M23’s military chief, General Sultani Makenga. With a laugh, Isaac told me, “I also have a photo of myself with President Tshisekedi”—the current leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “But I’ve put that photo away.” Tshisekedi lives in the capital, Kinshasa, which sits nearly a thousand miles away, toward the Atlantic coast. The M23 fighters were heavily armed and close at hand; they were also backed by the neighboring state of Rwanda, whose border runs along the edge of Goma. “As king, I must obey the decisions of the state,” Mwami Isaac said. “Now I must obey the M23, because here it is the government.”
The fighting over Goma had been fierce; several thousand people died, including hundreds of civilians and government troops. But it was only the latest manifestation of a decades-long fight between the D.R.C. and Rwanda, which has grown to involve several other countries and scores of ethnic militias in the forests of eastern Congo. The governments involved have stoked the fighting with Romanian mercenaries, Russian fighter jets, and Chinese drones. “The only way to survive in this minefield is to stay neutral,” Mwami Isaac said. But he acknowledged, “It’s difficult to rule over seven hundred thousand people and stay apolitical. We try and maintain a balance.”
The fighting in eastern Congo seldom makes the international news, except during extraordinary spasms of violence. This summer, though, there was a moment of renewed interest, when President Donald Trump announced that he had “stopped” the war—one of eight (or perhaps nine) conflicts that he claims to have resolved in his quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. Emissaries from Rwanda and the D.R.C. dutifully appeared in Washington, to be photographed shaking hands, making optimistic speeches, and signing agreements. In a parallel effort, the government of Qatar oversaw negotiations between the M23 rebels and the Congolese government. For months, the two initiatives plodded along, with photo ops and declarations of good will. Meanwhile, the fighting kept up, and military leaders talked about more aggressive campaigns. In two visits that I made to Rwanda and eastern Congo this fall, the war seemed far too entrenched to be easily stopped. Many observers feared that it would grow until it stretched across the country to the capital.
In Goma, it’s easy to see signs of conflict, but difficult to tell whether they were caused by recent battles or by earlier ones. The M23 incursion in January left buildings pocked with bullet holes; it also left hundreds of victims buried in an unmarked cemetery next to the city’s airport. Their graves are set among older ones on acres of weeds and rocks.
The airport, surrounded by a security wall festooned with razor wire, was partly destroyed in the fighting, despite being guarded by one of the largest U.N. peacekeeping forces in the world. Intended as a regional “stabilization mission,” the force includes ten thousand troops, spread between Goma and a few other locales. It is estimated to have cost twenty-seven billion dollars since its inception, in 1999—but, because it lacks an effective mandate to intervene to halt violence, it is considered all but irrelevant.
The presence of peacekeepers in eastern Congo can seem like the U.N.’s way of apologizing for failing to halt the Rwandan genocide, a singularly brutal conflict that is the wellspring of the current violence in the region. For three months in 1994, Hutu extremists, who represented the ethnic majority in Rwanda, conducted a monstrous slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. At least eight hundred thousand people died, many of them executed by drunk men who had been urged by the Hutu-led government to exterminate their neighbors. Victims were murdered with machetes, garden hoes, and clubs; their bodies were tossed into rivers, dumped in ditches, and hurled into wells and pit latrines. Churches offered sanctuary, until men arrived to murder the families inside. The killers referred to what they were doing as “work” and to their victims as “cockroaches.” By the time it was over, Rwanda’s Tutsi population had been reduced by eighty-five per cent.
Throughout the violence, the U.N. resisted calls to intervene, and refused to describe what was happening as a genocide. So did the U.S. State Department. The task of halting the slaughter was left largely to the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi guerrilla army led by an enigmatic thirty-six-year-old named Paul Kagame.
The R.P.F. eventually seized the capital, Kigali, and Kagame took control of the government. The killing wound down, but ethnic tensions remained. The same people who had organized the genocide led an exodus of Hutus across the border into the D.R.C., and as many as a million settled in camps around Goma. When a cholera epidemic broke out there, killing some fifty thousand people, the international relief community hastened to provide the Hutu refugees with food, shelter, and medical care. As Philip Gourevitch wrote in “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families,” his haunting book about the genocide, the outside world had largely ignored the extermination of the Tutsis, but it “responded to the mass flight of Hutus . . . with passionate intensity.”
It was perhaps inevitable that the war that had begun in Rwanda would continue in Congo. Though the Hutus in the camps were largely civilians, there were thousands among them who had participated in the mass killing, and their leaders quickly became a Hutu government in exile. They remained armed, and continued to conduct raids against the Tutsis across the border.
In 1996, Rwanda’s new government sent troops into the camps to root out the génocidaires. In a short and vicious campaign that became known as the First Congo War, Kagame’s army pursued the Hutu forces across the country, all the way to Kinshasa. In the capital, the Rwandans overthrew President Joseph Mobutu. In his place, they installed a local ally, Laurent-Désiré Kabila—a gold entrepreneur and a former Maoist rebel leader.
At first, Kabila ruled the D.R.C. in concert with the Rwandans. But before long he turned against his patrons, and they launched a new incursion to force him out. The Second Congo War, as it became known, divided the region: several African nations took sides with Kabila, while Uganda joined forces with Rwanda. The fighting dragged on for five years, until a peace agreement was signed in 2003. By then, Kabila had been shot dead by one of his soldiers, and his son Joseph had been handed control of the country.
While a succession of treaties and opaque power-sharing deals have determined who rules in Kinshasa, the violence in the eastern hinterlands has never stopped. Armed groups have proliferated in a complex web of alliances, defections, and betrayals. An estimated hundred and twenty militias are now active, propped up variously by governments around the region and by political factions within the D.R.C. Among the most prominent forces are the M23, aligned with Rwanda, and the Wazalendo and the F.D.L.R., aligned with the Congolese government. Massacres are commonplace, and huge numbers of people have been killed by fighters, or by displacement, starvation, and disease. The estimated over-all death toll since the First Congo War broke out is between four and six million.
In Goma, three decades of humanitarian crisis have had a curious effect: a population boom. The city has grown from about a hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants to as many as two million, primarily owing to displacement by war from the surrounding countryside. The residents, victims and perpetrators alike, are generally busy trying to survive. The city sits alongside Lake Kivu, and men spend their days on the shoreline, waiting with sponges and water buckets for cars to wash. Others line up to serve as day laborers, filling sacks with sand transported by barge and then carrying them on their backs to delivery trucks. From the docks, ferries run to the city of Bukavu, a hundred and twenty miles down the shore. Bukavu, like Goma, fell to the M23 early this year.
Most of Goma is a warren of improvised housing, with tin shacks for the poorest and cinder-block huts for those a little better off. But the market streets are jammed with people buying and selling. Women in elegant African-print dresses carry burdens on their heads; men in cast-off Western clothes push wooden carts laden with potatoes and carrots. The atmosphere is noisy and sociable, a hubbub of music and conversation. Occasionally, jeeps full of M23 fighters push past, while the civilians pretend to ignore them. Like the king of Bukumu, the city’s residents have largely adjusted to the M23, but they know that it’s safer not to engage.
Along the lakeshore are the headquarters of relief agencies: U.N.H.C.R., I.C.R.C., War Child, Tearfund. Around town, you see plastic sheets and grain sacks stamped with the joined-hands emblem of U.S.A.I.D.—the world’s largest aid agency, before it was decimated by the Trump Administration. U.S.A.I.D.’s demise has removed the main source of rape kits, H.I.V. medications, and nutritional supplements for malnourished children, essential support for millions of people in eastern Congo.
At a hospital in Goma, the director, a jovial man in a doctor’s coat and blue Crocs, told me that he and his staff were handling about five rape cases every day. He believed that many more women were being attacked, but that not all of them had the means, or the courage, to come seek treatment. Rape is routinely used as a weapon of war in eastern Congo; U.N. investigators say that the incidence of sexual violence is among the worst in the world. The director said that most of the assaults took place on the outskirts of Goma and in the countryside beyond. Armed men invaded houses and raped women, often in front of their husbands, who were then killed. Other women were assaulted while they worked in the fields or fetched firewood. Sometimes they were gang-raped, or violated with foreign objects. The director said that the most difficult case he had dealt with recently was a woman who had a tree branch jammed into her vagina. She had survived, thanks to intensive surgery.
I asked who was committing this violence. Was it the F.D.L.R. militia, which is led by the remnants of the Hutu génocidaires? Or was it the M23? The director shrugged. The rapists attacked at night, and usually did not announce which group they belonged to. All he could say, as a doctor, was that there were more rapes now than before. At the hospital, he and his colleagues tested victims for H.I.V. and gave them clothes and “dignity kits,” containing soap, menstrual pads, and other essentials. In cases of severe trauma, they offered psychotherapy. But, since U.S.A.I.D. ended its support, they had been unable to supply rape kits to collect evidence. There were also no courts handling rape cases in Goma, so he and his team were the only outlet for any testimony that victims dared to provide.
One afternoon, I saw an elderly woman hoeing the ground in the unmarked cemetery across from Goma’s airport. She introduced herself as Zabandora, and told me that she was planting soybeans. It was open land, and she lived nearby, she explained, waving toward a row of shacks. Two harvests a year gave her just enough to live on. During the recent fighting, she had stayed away and prayed, returning to her crops only when it was all over. At the graveyard, she found people burying relatives and told them that she usually planted there, between the headstones. They said that they would understand if she continued.
Goma has a few wealthier residents. On the lakeshore is a smattering of luxury hotels and opulent villas; the current style favors complex curving façades, wrought-iron verandas, and mirrored glass rising above the street. The M23 occupies several handsome buildings, including a well-guarded compound with landscaped gardens for its political leaders.
Despite Congo’s widespread poverty, it is extraordinarily rich in natural resources. Near Goma, there are lucrative mines for gold and for coltan, which is crucial to manufacturing batteries and cellphones. Farther west is an enormous copper belt, much of which is in Chinese hands. In the D.R.C., who profits from the sale of resources has long depended on who holds political power, or who controls the territory.
In an earlier era, the area around Goma, a region of vast lakes and forests, was the ivory belt of equatorial Africa, and the target of slaving expeditions from the Arab world. Tippu Tip, a notorious trader in the nineteenth century, amassed some ten thousand slaves and a fortune in ivory, growing rich enough to once make a serious attempt to secure his own autonomous state in eastern Congo.
During the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, European colonial powers carved up Africa for their own use. Germany secured the lands that are now Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania; the sprawling wilderness of Congo went to King Leopold II of Belgium. The colonists took up where Tippu Tip left off, plundering the forests for ivory and other resources. Although slavery was formally outlawed, the practice persisted with unusual brutality. Before the Belgians withdrew, in 1960, they extracted billions of dollars’ worth of rubber and precious metals, at the cost of millions of Congolese lives. Like other colonists, they left only because a U.N. mandate forced them out, and they did not go quietly. Congo’s first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, who showed sympathies for Moscow, was executed in 1961, in an operation orchestrated by Belgium and the C.I.A.
The battle for control of land and resources in Congo fuels the current conflict, too. The militias at work in the east compete for money and influence, much of which comes through links to mining interests. They live off whatever can be extracted from the land—gold and coltan, cacao, charcoal made by burning down forests.
Nearly all the militias are based around ethnicity. The F.D.L.R. is avowedly Hutu. The M23, founded in 2012, styles itself as a protector of the Tutsis. Congo’s Tutsi population, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, is a small minority in a country with more than a hundred million citizens, but a significant presence in North and South Kivu, where they are concentrated. The Tutsis are traditionally herders and tend to be richer than the Hutus, who are farmers; their relative wealth is a source of resentment. In Congo, Tutsis face widespread discrimination and bigoted invective. As a result of the 1994 genocide and the subsequent fighting, tensions between the tribes intensified—and so did Rwanda’s interest in protecting Tutsis across the border. Although the Rwandan government denies being involved with the M23, it has persistently supplied direction, money, and manpower, along with drones and other technology; several thousand Rwandan soldiers participated in the siege of Goma.
The M23’s most prominent representative in Goma is Bertrand Bisimwa, who leads its political wing. When I met him, he blithely dismissed the idea that the M23 was an occupying force. “We are Congolese citizens,” he said. “We cannot be invaders of our own country.” He denied accusations of war crimes, as well as reports that miners and farmers had been forced to bribe soldiers to use their own land. The money was merely a “security tax,” he said. “We play the role of the state.”
He lost his composure only when speaking about his enemies, whom he accused of being drug addicts and cannibals. “They are given a specific face as their enemy—the face of a Tutsi,” he said. “The war we are waging is an existential war.”
Around Goma, there are persistent rumors that the M23 is actually commanded by Rwanda’s President, or perhaps its former defense secretary. During my visit, people seemed to defer to another leader: an ebullient figure named Corneille Nangaa. I met Nangaa one morning at a friend’s villa on Lake Kivu. He was wearing a sharply tailored dark suit, a Tesla baseball cap, and a blue shirt with a metal Hugo Boss insignia. He carried a walking stick carved from pale wood. As security men fanned out, Nangaa led me to a table on a fastidiously clipped lawn, where waiters brought an extravagant breakfast. More guards stood on a nearby dock, staring out to Lake Kivu.
Nangaa is the head of the Congo River Alliance, a large, ethnically mixed rebel group, but he spent much of his earlier career working for the Congolese government. In 2018, as the head of the national electoral commission, he oversaw one of the murkiest and most influential political deals in Congo’s recent history.
At the time, Joseph Kabila had been President of the D.R.C. for seventeen years, overseeing an administration known for its unfettered corruption. As the Presidential election approached, Kabila was increasingly unpopular, and a viable opponent was found: Félix Tshisekedi, a thickset, pugnacious man who was the son of a prominent opposition leader. Tshisekedi ended up winning, but the election was so dubious that many observers assumed he had done so by cutting a power-sharing deal with Kabila.
Nangaa handled the difficult negotiations around Kabila’s departure. It was Congo’s first peaceful transfer of power in decades, but it didn’t last. Within a few years, both Nangaa and Kabila had fallen out with Tshisekedi and fled across the country to Goma, where they allied themselves with the M23. Kabila has been visiting African capitals to build support for the militia, which he is rumored to be helping to fund with a huge fortune that he built while in power. This past September, Tshisekedi retaliated by having Kabila tried in absentia and sentenced to death for war crimes and treason.
From our breakfast table, Nangaa gestured at forested hills that rose above the lake. “That’s Rwanda, a country which has accomplished everything we have not,” he said. I had heard the same sentiment from many others in the region. The D.R.C. is vastly larger than Rwanda, with nearly ten times its population and far more abundant natural resources, but it has proved incapable of securing peace or prosperity for its citizens. Rwanda, by contrast, has made enviable social and economic progress in the past few decades. People who live on the Congolese side of the border often cross into Rwanda to get mail and to do their banking. The M23 established its compound in Goma conveniently close to the crossing.
Nangaa complained that the Congolese government had thwarted free enterprise. He told me that, at the Berlin Conference, the colonialists intended the D.R.C. to become the Congo Free State—which, in his eccentric interpretation, was a libertarian paradise. “Our vision is to go back to that original idea, so that everyone can come and do business here,” he said. “If Trump wants to come, he’ll come and do business.” Trump has said forthrightly that he expects the U.S. to get a portion of the D.R.C.’s mineral wealth in exchange for fostering talks; Gentry Beach, an American financier who is friends with Donald Trump, Jr., recently visited and reportedly spoke of taking over a major coltan mine.
Before the D.R.C. can become the Congo Free State, Nangaa said, “it first needs to create a state.” A country requires an effective army, police force, justice system, and administration—but, he said, “here it’s all corrupted.” With a solicitous look, he added, “Everyone can blame the West, but it values hard work. Here, the people don’t work.”
Nangaa argued that Tshisekedi had chronically mismanaged the country. In 2022, after a period of relative quiet, the M23 began clashing with the Congolese Army, a corrupt and largely ineffectual force. Tshisekedi invited troops from countries around the region to come fight for his regime, and hired mercenaries from Eastern Europe. In an arms-buying spree worth billions of dollars, he acquired Turkish attack drones and Russian warplanes. When that didn’t halt the M23, his government called up fighters throughout Congo to join the Wazalendo—a nationalist militia movement whose name means “the patriots.” Tshisekedi urged his supporters to fight “for our Congolese identity.” In a fit of paranoia, he also arrested dozens of generals he suspected of siding with the M23, along with influential Tutsis who were accused of espionage.
To fill out the ranks of the Wazalendo, Tshisekedi distributed weapons to ethnic militias and criminal gangs. Nangaa told me that, though the M23 controlled Goma, many Wazalendo remained active around the city. “Our boys are arresting them, even now, ten to twenty of them every night,” he said. (According to Human Rights Watch, the M23 is also killing them; scores of young men have been found shot dead.)
Nangaa assured me that the war would be won before long. “We have a project for the country,” he said. “We know what we want to do.” The D.R.C. had no roads through the countryside, he pointed out. “After creating the state, we must connect all the territories, to get the people together.” Once the various tribes were linked, it would “take away discrimination,” he said. “That is how we create a nation. I have a dream, just like Martin Luther King said.” Nangaa laughed, pleased with his formulation.
For the country to be reformed, Nangaa said, “Tshisekedi must be removed by force. He doesn’t have the capacity to understand what he has to do as head of state. What is important to him is to enjoy the red carpet.” Nangaa is unabashed about his own aspiration to be the D.R.C.’s next President. Over breakfast, I asked about his walking stick. “This?” he said, raising it aloft. “It gives me power.”
“What kind of power?” I asked.
“All kinds of power,” he said and smiled.
In June, when Trump announced that he had brought peace to eastern Congo, he described it as “a glorious triumph.” But the M23 had not agreed to disband. A militia spokesman told the Associated Press, “We are in Goma with the population, and we are not going to get out.”
A Western diplomat in the region told me that the M23 seemed to be attempting to set down permanent roots in North Kivu. They had upended the traditional system of justice, administered by tribal chiefs. After registries of property deeds were burned during the fighting, the M23 had simply handed out land to people it favored.
Taking Goma had given the M23 control of a vast arsenal left behind by the defeated Congolese Army—as much as a third of the country’s military equipment, the diplomat said. The militia had also acquired an estimated twelve thousand new troops, many of them captured government soldiers who were either enticed or forced to serve. “The M23 have never enjoyed this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The risk for them is they now have fallen into the same trap as the D.R.C. government—having to administer the territory they control.”
If the M23’s stewardship of North Kivu is a test case for running the country, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, told me that electricity and banking services had lapsed in Goma, while the “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” had continued. In July, according to the U.N., M23 fighters massacred more than three hundred civilians in a group of frontline villages about forty miles from town. “Every day, there is killing,” Muyaya said. “The people running that part of the country—the only thing they know is crime.”
An hour’s drive northwest of Goma, across a vast moonscape of black lava, is a shambolic roadside community called Sake. For several years before the fall of Goma, it was a frontline town in the fight between the M23 and government forces. Displaced people’s tents, made from plastic sheeting supplied by N.G.O.s, are pitched alongside abandoned homesites, many of them burned to their foundations. The settlement is dug into jagged rock around a Catholic church, the Miséricorde Divine.
The priest, a burly man with wary eyes, explained that he had been appointed to Sake in 2023, when the Wazalendo were entrenched there. As the M23 moved in, he said, it captured several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly trucked them away. The church was looted and burned, and the town became “like bush,” he said, with almost no inhabitants remaining. “We had to start from zero again.”
Gradually, people had returned, but they struggled to sustain themselves, and attacks continued. Some drivers for a relief agency had been kidnapped during a visit to the priest’s compound, so no one stayed overnight at the church anymore. When I asked if he slept there, he retorted, “How could I leave? I’m the priest.” But many of the civilians were packing up and heading to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he said wryly. Along with the threat of violence in Goma, there was a shortage of food, because the farmers who supplied the city had fled their land. The priest said that he was forty years old and had known nothing but conflict in his life. With a disgusted look, he said, “I’m very tired of fighting, and I call upon the leaders to end it.”
The Presidents of Congo and Rwanda have spent much of the past year trading insults. Tshisekedi has likened Kagame to Hitler and declared, “One thing is responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression.” Kagame tends to be cutting, rather than blunt. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air force to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded, “Tshisekedi is capable of everything except measuring the consequences of what he says.”
The son of Tutsi exiles to Uganda, Kagame served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan Army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As President, he has been the subject of both praise and condemnation abroad. He is a ruthless strategist capable of waging bloody wars, but he has also fostered a remarkable program to reintegrate tens of thousands of former génocidaires into Rwandan society. He has been accused of many authoritarian acts, including assassinating political opponents, but he has turned his country into a regional powerhouse, with a disciplined army that has been deployed to aid embattled allies. “Rwanda has made itself an amazingly efficient place to work and do business in—as long as you stay in your lane,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to root for them. But, on the other hand, they have been responsible for several decades of horrific actions inside D.R.C.”
People carry wood and charcoal near Mweso. The M23 holds the town, but a rival group holds ground in the hills nearby.
I met Kagame in a boardroom at his Presidential office. Tall and rake-thin, he spoke with gnomic deliberation. When I asked about the peace process, he said, “It’s important to be optimistic. Otherwise, why would you get to work? But, realistically, the amount of pessimism is very significant.” He was dismissive of interventions from the “international community” in eastern Congo. “The U.N. has been involved in this problem for the last thirty years,” he said. “They have spent billions of dollars, on peacekeeping missions, N.G.O.s, all kinds of things. What has come out of this effort?”
Gradually, he worked his way toward blaming the Congolese for the conflict in the east. “It’s not Rwanda that is the most affected by the problem,” he said. “There are complex problems that originate from colonial times, when borders were being drawn, and then there are matters of tribes and ethnic groups. Most of these are to be found in any other place. But they have been overcome by governance internally, even if this is to be assisted by external actors.” Finally, he said, “After all these years, Congo can’t find a formula where the first responsibility goes to domestic leaders. You can’t just keep all this blame game going on.”
Some critics have argued that the remaining F.D.L.R. Hutu militias, which may have as few as two thousand soldiers, pose a minimal threat to Rwanda. When I raised the idea, Kagame replied evenly, “When a hurricane is building up, we should work from the assumption that it might come our way.” He added, “Our interpretation is, what happened here is enough. We’re not going back.” People who accused Rwanda of aggression, he said, were “silencing the victim and, in the end, turning the victim into the perpetrator.”
Kagame suggested that I speak to his longtime aide James Kabarebe, who was as gruff as his boss was elliptical. An ex-soldier in his mid-sixties, Kabarebe has led Rwandan forces in every significant conflict since the genocide. When Kabila was installed as President of the D.R.C., Kabarebe became the head of Congo’s Army; then, after the two fell out, he led the fight to depose him. He now holds the cumbersome title of Rwanda’s “minister of state for foreign affairs in charge of regional cooperation.” After the fall of Goma, the U.S. government sanctioned Kabarebe, accusing him of aiding the M23 and of facilitating the illegal export of minerals from Congo.
In his office, Kabarebe claimed that his government did not support the M23, saying, “We have put their leaders in prison.” (He was referring to the former M23 warlord Laurent Nkunda, who is supposed to be in a Rwandan jail but is rumored to be living freely under government protection.) Yet he also suggested that Rwanda would be justified in supporting anyone who protected Tutsis. After the conflict of 1994, he said, “the international community assisted the genocidal forces to move into the D.R.C.” Since then, he argued, the border had posed an existential threat to Rwanda. “Having a genocidal army next door is suicidal,” he said. “This is not understood well in the West.”
Kabarebe contended that the Hutu militia posed a commercial threat, too. “We have a soldier posted along every metre of the border,” he said. “We do this to protect the mountain gorillas, which are the basis for our tourism industry.” Tourism, much of it built around wildlife, accounts for roughly ten per cent of Rwanda’s economy. Kabarebe said that since 2018 the militias had staged dozens of attacks in the parks where the gorillas live. At one point, mortar shells crashed down near a gorilla-research center established by Ellen DeGeneres. (As a Rwandan aide told me, “We can’t have that.”)
Outside observers say that the main reason for Rwanda’s interest in D.R.C. is to control its mineral wealth. Among other things, the Rwandans have been said to secretly transport niobium from a mine near Goma across the border and then export it. Rwanda’s annual gold exports have increased sixfold in eight years, to $1.5 billion. Kabarebe vehemently disputed the accusations. “The mineral exploitation has nothing to do with the conflict with D.R.C.,” he insisted. “It’s about security. The minerals go as they go, but Rwanda has nothing to do with it.”
Kabarebe cited several cross-border attacks in 2022 as the impetus for the latest intervention. “President Kagame decided to take defensive measures to protect our border,” he said. “And then this narrative began that Rwanda was an invader wanting the minerals of the D.R.C.” Western countries had applied sanctions to Rwanda, and to Kabarebe personally, but he described them as a minor irritant. “I’m used to it,” he said. “I am happy and comfortable here.”
The frontline town of Mweso is only sixty-two miles from Goma, but the trip takes six hours by Land Cruiser, along a road that has devolved into a cratered gantlet of rocks and mud. Near the halfway mark begins a ragged, ill-defined war zone, where the M23 prevails in roadside villages, but much of the surrounding wilderness is held by the Wazalendo.
The few settlements I passed through were dismally poor. People gazed sullenly at my truck, though a few excited children ran alongside, begging for money or a “stylo”—a pen to do their schoolwork. There were almost no other vehicles on the road, aside from a handful of green Army jeeps carrying M23 fighters.
The landscape, full of mountainsides riven by forests and terrace farms, provided a visible index of contested territory. An immense valley led to a line of blue mountains in the distance: Virunga National Park, where the mountain gorillas coexisted uneasily with F.D.L.R. Hutu fighters. The valley was once deeply forested, but its trees had been burned for charcoal, to provide income for militants and their families.
For about three hours, the track wound through a seemingly endless range of green hills populated by grazing cows—a kind of Congolese Switzerland. It was a single enormous farm, owned by the former President Joseph Kabila, whose known land holdings are nearly twelve times the size of Manhattan. As I descended back into the forest, the road became rocky, and the crops turned to sugarcane and cassava. This was Hutu territory, where the M23 were interlopers.
Mweso was a bleak whistle-stop town, built around a main street—a mud wash, on the night I arrived—lined with ramshackle bars, phone-card kiosks, and car-repair shops. Mweso’s electricity came from a patchwork of noisy diesel generators, and the restaurants were dirt-floored places that sold plates of fatty goat meat and boiled cassava mash. In the hills above the town, the M23 and a local Hutu militia that called itself the C.M.C. had established positions, from which they traded gunfire. The M23 held Mweso, but the C.M.C. carried out frequent raids into town to supply its fighters.
A Médecins Sans Frontières outpost sat behind a security wall, and a hundred yards down the road was a hospital, which M.S.F. helped fund and oversee. With nearly three hundred beds and four hundred and fifty staff members, it was the largest medical facility around, and one of the busiest.
The acting director, Alain Ntsirie Kubuya, told me that the hospital operated on a permanent emergency footing; malaria and other diseases were rampant, as was malnutrition, because the war had prevented people from planting crops. The hospital also took in about fifteen wounded patients a week, from all sides. Kubuya said that his staff had established an agreement with the leaders of the fighting factions: “We inform the occupiers of the zone that we are going to retrieve a wounded person.” The militias generally respected the M.S.F. as a neutral body, he said, but occasionally there was trouble.
A middle-aged man in an orange T-shirt that read “Happy International Nurses Day” introduced himself as Sifumungu Byenda Bisgod, the head of surgical nursing. A few days earlier, he and his team had informed the M23 that they were retrieving a wounded Wazalendo fighter from the field, but, when they reached a roadblock, the soldiers there pulled everyone out of the vehicles and wanted to execute the man. The crew argued back, and finally the soldiers relented. “This kind of thing happens about twice a week,” he said.
Bisgod said that there had been some early difficulties with putting rivals in the same ward, so now they kept the factions apart. Only nurses and doctors were allowed access to Wazalendo patients. “We tell them to keep a low profile and, once they are feeling better, not to go wandering around, as they are in an M23 zone,” Bisgod said. Some patients had gone into town, been recognized as Wazalendo, and been murdered on the spot. After a patient recovered, the hospital crew informed the M23 that they had to “make a movement,” a euphemism for returning a fighter to his comrades. “We do this without going into too many details about who it is we are taking,” Bisgod said.
In the Wazalendo ward, seven or eight fighters lay in cots. The oldest was thirty-nine, the youngest seventeen. A few had lost limbs, and wore bloody bandages on the stumps. They looked wary, but, after Bisgod introduced me, a fighter named Tchayo agreed to talk. A stern young man in a blue T-shirt with his foot in a cast, he shared a bed with another man who had lost an arm. Tchayo and four others in the room had been wounded in a firefight with the M23 three weeks earlier. One comrade had been killed. Afterward, local farmers had helped the survivors reach a spot where there was phone reception, and they had called the hospital to come pick them up.
Tchayo had been a primary-school teacher before he became a fighter for the C.M.C., nine years ago. He said that he had joined because “Tutsi people have been aggressing us. We are Hutus. They were bringing their animals to eat our crops.”
Tchayo acknowledged that there had been a genocide in Rwanda, “but they have taken their war here,” he said. He mentioned that Tutsi militants had committed a large-scale massacre in his area. “They use the genocide as an excuse,” he said. When I asked what he planned to do when he got better, he replied, “My goal is to go back and do my job, because the enemy has not returned to Rwanda. So I will return to the fight.”
In a ward about a hundred feet away, a government soldier whom I’ll call Jean lay bandaged all over, breathing with the help of oxygen. Jean, thirty-nine, had been deployed in Sake when it fell to the M23. Along with hundreds of others, he had been taken prisoner and pressed into service for the militia. After two months of training, there was a graduation ceremony, in which more than seven thousand new fighters were paraded before senior leaders. “Makenga came,” Jean said between wheezes. “Nangaa came.” Afterward, the soldiers were deployed to the front lines. On the way, Jean’s vehicle crashed, and he broke some bones and punctured a lung.
He explained that he had a wife and two children back home: “I don’t know anything about them since January.” Tears gathered on his cheeks. I asked how he felt about fighting for the M23. “It drove me crazy,” he replied softly. “You can see me crying. My unit was also my family.”
The malnutrition ward was filled with crying babies and distraught-looking parents. An emaciated man sat by a child stretched out semiconscious on a cot, where two other small children were receiving oxygen. The man wore a dirty jacket and rubber boots, and had unkempt hair. With eyes glistening, he gazed attentively at his child, who looked nearly dead of starvation. The doctor explained that the man and his family had been hiding in the forest for two months, because fighters had taken over their village. They had been surviving on roots, yams, and whatever else they could find. He had five children, but he had left the other four with his wife, to seek medical attention for the weakest one. I asked the doctor if the child could be saved. He said that he hoped so. What would the father do afterward? “He will go back to the forest, because the rest of his family is still there,” the doctor said.
In a filthy schoolhouse across the street, several hundred displaced people were camped out. A wizened community leader told me that they were from a village a few miles outside Mweso. Months earlier, they had fled during fighting between the rival militias. The M23 had ultimately been forced out, but when the villagers returned they discovered that fighters had burned their homes. “When they lose, they take it out on the civilians, and we are Hutu,” the leader explained. For now, he and the other able-bodied men and women were working as day laborers on local farms, earning the equivalent of about fifty cents a day. Were they safe now? I asked. “Here in town it is safe, but outside, in the farms, if the armed men see you, they kill you, even if you don’t have a gun,” he said. In his village, many people had been killed. “They threw them into the toilets,” he said.
As I was leaving Mweso, a pickup truck raced up in front of the hospital. A group of tough-looking young men clambered out and half carried one of their comrades out from the back. He was unsteady on his feet and had burns all over his torso and face. It seemed as if he had come straight from the battlefield. A Congolese man who was travelling with me whispered, “Wazalendo,” and suggested that we move along.
President Kagame’s emissary to the peace talks in the U.S. is Mauro De Lorenzo, an affable forty-nine-year-old who is fluent in five languages and conversant in several more. De Lorenzo grew up in Delaware and started visiting Rwanda in 1998, to research a Ph.D. thesis. He now holds citizenship there. When he speaks about Rwandans, he says “we.”
A few weeks into the new Trump Administration, Kagame sent De Lorenzo to Washington, to promote Rwanda’s interests. He quickly faced competition. Tshisekedi had written Trump a letter, gushing that his election had “ushered in the golden age for America,” and offering access to Congolese minerals in exchange for a security pact. De Lorenzo said that, when he arrived, “I found at least seven different lobbyists hired by different parts of the Congolese government. They were all sending out these proposals. I’ll exaggerate a bit: ‘We will give you twenty-four trillion dollars in Congolese minerals, and we’ll throw in a military base, and in exchange you will conduct a tactical nuclear strike on Kigali.’ ”
The Trump Administration had its own peculiarities. “You basically have the government of the United States and the White House, which are like these reinforced fortresses,” De Lorenzo said. “And then you have Mar-a-Lago, around which oscillates all sorts of asteroids, and where it’s not difficult for even low-level lobbyist types to gain access if they’re noticed on the terrace.” In mid-March, he said, “one of these asteroids finally collides with President Trump, and I heard that Massad Boulos was going to be the African envoy.”
Boulos, a Lebanese American transportation entrepreneur based in Nigeria, had no diplomatic experience, but he had a family link to the White House: his son is married to Tiffany Trump. De Lorenzo recalled that his appointment sent officials scrambling. “Insiders in Washington had been planning different things, and all that disappears—we now have this guy, an in-law,” he said. “Nobody knows what it means. Does it mean he talks to Trump every day? They don’t know. But it does mean he can talk to Presidents and other principals, people you could do business with.”
The pitch that De Lorenzo formulated cast Rwanda as a crucial player in the trade of resources from eastern Congo: “Look, this whole narrative that the war is about minerals—O.K., let’s assume there is interest in minerals, and that we’d like them to come from and go through Rwanda. And there should be nothing wrong with that. The problem is there has never been a state authority in eastern Congo. So let’s us be the place where people will invest in capital-intensive processing activities, which has traditionally eluded Africa.”
De Lorenzo’s conception is echoed in a plan, the Regional Economic Integration Framework, which is now a central feature of Trump’s peace deal. The accord, not so different in spirit from the colonial Berlin Conference, suggests that, rather than fight over the resources of eastern Congo, the various partisans should simply share them.
The Rwandans balked, but Qatar urged them to sign. The Qataris, along with their role as mediators, had a financial interest: they were already partners in a multibillion-dollar deal to turn Rwanda into a regional financial and logistics hub, and the minerals would provide enormous revenue. Rwanda also had experience in transporting and processing Congolese ores, which could help sell the deal to the U.S. A humanitarian expert in the region told me, “The fact is, everyone just wants to keep extracting from the D.R.C., and now President Trump does, too.” He went on, “With Trump, there’s what I call an immunity blanket, meaning ‘You give me what I want, and I’ll give you a pass on human rights.’ ”
Last month, the negotiators gathered in Washington to endorse the framework, but at the last minute Tshisekedi ordered his envoy to withdraw, reportedly because Rwanda would not remove ninety per cent of its troops from eastern Congo. De Lorenzo suggested that some Republicans in D.C. were pleased by the hitch in Boulos’s plan. “There’s Schadenfreude there about him messing things up,” he said. Boulos, he added, was “the Rodney Dangerfield of the Trump Administration—just trying to get a little respect.” But Boulos was persistent, and De Lorenzo, like other observers I talked to, felt that he had no option but to place his faith in him. “I think the only way for the process to move forward is if the U.S. gets behind it,” he said.
In mid-November, Boulos made a series of hopeful announcements: representatives from Congo, Rwanda, and the M23 had initialled the Regional Economic Integration Framework, as part of an agreement that “charts a clear path toward a peace accord.”
The document was not in itself a peace deal; it was a set of eight protocols that an eventual deal should observe. First among them were a prisoner exchange and a mechanism to monitor a ceasefire. Even Boulos acknowledged that these steps would be difficult to implement. “This is not a light switch that you just switch on and off,” he told reporters.
Previous rounds of talks had also produced an agreement to exchange prisoners, but Tshisekedi had stalled. Corneille Nangaa, of the Congo River Alliance, told me that he believed many of the prisoners were already dead. Another agreement had called for militias to disarm, but, Nangaa predicted, “it will take decades to take away those guns.”
Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, spoke warily about the peace initiative. “We are making some progress, though not at the speed we would like,” he said. “For there to be real advances, we must insure that the M23 ceases to exist.” Like the Rwandan officials I spoke with, Muyaya insisted that his side was trapped in a fight for survival. “The people have the right to defend themselves if armed men are attacking your mother, your sister,” he said. “Of course, there are abuses. And the President is determined to bring those committing abuses to justice.” He brushed off the idea that the Hutu militias posed a threat: “This is just an excuse used by Rwanda to keep on looting resources.”
Outside observers say that the Wazalendo are growing more radical, and that anti-Tutsi sentiment is increasing. Yet they also note that the M23’s depredations have only made such sentiments worse. The Western diplomat said that Rwanda had an urgent interest in halting the war. “As long as there is conflict, you will have young men growing up in eastern D.R.C. with destabilization of the other as their imperative in life, and you will have opposition politicians in Kinshasa who will exploit that for political gain,” the diplomat said. But the incentives are complicated. Jason Stearns, an academic and a former U.N. investigator who has focussed on the conflict for decades, told me, “People want peace, but it’s not really in the M23’s interests. The same logic applies to Rwanda, but somewhat less so.” If Rwanda disbands the M23 and withdraws its troops from Congo, it loses its ability to project influence across the border. It may also lose a source of revenue. The peace deal offers Rwanda rights to refine and sell Congolese tin and tantalum, but it does not offer gold, the most valuable commodity. “A very large part of Rwanda’s economy relies on the D.R.C., and that could be a challenge in the future if they withdraw,” Stearns said.
It is possible that Washington will threaten targeted sanctions to compel Rwanda to make an agreement. But, the Western diplomat said, “they need to insure that the deal they sign is actually upheld.” The problem is that Tshisekedi is “incapable of upholding anything,” he went on. There is no guarantee that the Wazalendo will abide by an agreement with the M23. And Congo’s national army isn’t strong enough to hold the eastern territory alone, or to defeat the M23. After years of stoking outrage at Rwanda, Tshisekedi may find it politically difficult to make concessions—but he also seems unlikely to step aside. “You’d have to strangle Tshisekedi to get him to leave,” the diplomat said.
If the two sides can maintain a ceasefire, it will ease the crisis. But there will still be more than a hundred militias fighting for minerals and territory in eastern Congo. The diplomat mentioned one at work north of Goma: a vicious insurgent group whose leaders have sworn fealty to ISIS, and whose fighters had a gruesome habit of decapitating villagers. The militants were attracted by the gold mines in the area—and their presence provided Uganda with an excuse to intervene there with its own army. Uganda exports more than three billion dollars in gold a year, most of which comes from one mine in eastern Congo.
For the peace process to succeed, it will have to reverse a psychology of plunder that has afflicted the region for hundreds of years. Many of the people I talked with in Congo wished fervently for a new way of life but seemed barely able to conceive of one. In the hospital in Mweso, I met Irakunda, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of four, who was lying on a bed with children arrayed around her. She wore a bright print dress, and had one foot outstretched and wrapped in a bandage. The Wazalendo had appeared in her village the day before, and she had hidden inside the school. When the fighters began looting, the villagers shouted at them, so they opened fire, and one of the bullets struck her. She recounted all this as if she were describing a natural disaster. When I asked what she thought of the war, she laughed at the question; the war was just a fact of life. Finally, she said, “It’s the reason we are all poor. I am losing, because some people are making war.” ♦
